Members of France’s Kurdish community and others are holding a silent march Monday to honor three people killed in a shooting at a Kurdish cultural center in Paris.
A 69-year-old Frenchman is facing preliminary charges of racially motivated murder, attempted murder and weapons violations over Friday’s shooting, prosecutors said. The suspect told investigators that he had aimed to kill migrants or foreigners and then had planned to kill himself, and said he had a ‘’pathological’’ hatred of non-European foreigners, according to prosecutors.
He was briefly put in psychiatric care but then released back to ordinary police custody, and appeared Monday before an investigating judge. The suspect’s name has not been officially released though he is identified by French media as William K.
The shooting shocked and infuriated the Kurdish community in France, which organized the silent march Monday from the site of Friday’s shooting to the site where three women Kurdish activists were found shot dead in 2013.
Members of the Kurdish community say police should have done more to protect them. Skirmishes broke out in the neighborhood where the killings took place Friday, and again on the sidelines of a mostly peaceful Kurdish-led demonstration Saturday.
Prosecutors say the suspect had a clear racist motive for the shooting.
Antiracism activists and left-wing politicians have linked the shooting to a climate of hate speech online and anti-immigrant, xenophobic rhetoric by far-right figures. French authorities have reported a rise in race- or religion-related crimes and violations in recent years.
